Glass beads, probably milky white but possibly clear, with a lustrous bluish-gray synthetic coating. When held up to the light, the beads are slightly translucent.

Hole size:

1mm (estimated).

Defects:

The coating on Czech pearls is fairly thin, and I don't know how durable it is. Also, inevitably a few pearls will be missing some coating around one of the holes (a common defect with Czech coated beads). A few pearls may also have some anomalies in the coating, such as bumps, indentations or a bit of dirt.

How photographed:

At the window in natural daylight.

Comments:

IMPORTANT: These beads were a lovely bluish-gray when I bought them, but all the blue has faded out of them, and now they look steel gray. Although I had been selling pearls for over a decade, I didn't figure out until 2013 that any synthetically coated bead which has blue in it will fade over time, so I no longer buy those colors. (The colors affected are blue, bluish gray, aqua and purple -- and green beads may turn to olive green over time.) As steel-gray beads, these beads work perfectly well; but they were not steel gray when I got them.

I redid the picture in September, 2014, so it is accurate (actually, I think the actual beads look a bit better than they appear in the picture).